Let me tell you about a song called
Doc Brown
that needs no introduction.
Somewhere the sun is shining,
somewhere the songbirds dwell.
He was just an old country doctor in a little Kentucky town.
His fame and fortune had passed him by,
but we never saw him frown.
As day by day in his kindly way he served us one and all.
Many a patient forgot to pay,
although Doc's fees were small.
Though he needed his dimes,
and there were times that he'd receive a fee,
he'd pass it
on to some poor soul that needed it more than he.
He had to sell his furniture because he couldn't pay his office rent.
So to a dusty room over a livery stable,
Doc Brown and his satchel went.
And on the hitching post on the curb below to advertise his wares,
he nailed a little
sign that read,
Doc Brown has moved upstairs.
Then one day he didn't answer when they knocked
upon his door.
Old Doc Brown was lying down,
but his soul was no more.
They found him there
in that old black suit.
On his face was a smile of content,
but all the money they could
find on him was
just a quarter and a copper cent.
So they opened up his ledger, and what
they saw gave their hearts a pull.
For beside each debtor's name,
Old Doc had written these
words,
paid in full.
Old Doc should have had a funeral fine enough for a king.
It was a
ghastly joke that the whole town was broke and
no one could give a thing.
Except an old
Caleb Jones, the undertaker.
He did mighty well.
He donated an old iron casket that he'd
never been able to sell.
And that funeral procession,
well,
it wasn't much for grace,
pomp, style.
But those wagon load of mourners,
they stretched out for more than a mile.
We
wanted to give him a monument.
Kind of figured we owed him one.
Because he'd made our town
a better place for all the good he'd done.
So we pulled up that old hitching post where
Doc had nailed his sign.
We painted it white.
To all of us, it certainly did look fine.
Now the rains and snows have washed away our white trimming paints.
And there ain't nothing
left but Doc's own sign.
And that's getting kind of faint.
But you can still see that old
hitching post as if in answer to our prayers,
mutely telling the whole wide world,
Doc Brown
has moved upstairs.